[balex]

I had an excellent meal at Gaig last week in Barcelona. A tasting menu:

Some averagely good little snacks and crisps.

What would normally be called a deconstructed gazpacho, but disassembled would be a more accurate and less pretentious way of saying it; plain but delicious fresh i.e. uncooked tomato soup with a slightly sweetened cucumber sorbet and a crouton. Tasty and refreshing but not more than that.

Scallop with artichokes; a large beautiful scallop with some lovely small artichokes in a jus; very spare but the ingredients really sang; The texture of the artichoke was just right with a little bit of resilience to it.

Canneloni with a cream truffle sauce; chopped not minced meat in a lightly folded bit of fairly standard pasta dough with a light cream sauce with a very good clean flavour of truffle; not fresh presumable given the time of year, unless they actually have summer truffles with taste in Spain.

Tuna belly; this was an exceptional dish; heavily Japanese in its taste profile with a coating of crushed ikura/ salmon caviar on the top; a redundant garnish of aubergine puree on the side. The fish was indescribably tasty, and there was some other Japanese flavour in there which I couldn't quite put my finger on, (which shows I am not a real gourmet). A little bit of yuzu perhaps.

Pigeon with rice; rice cooked in pigeon stock with cepes, and a small piece of pigeon leg on top. A lot of extremely tasty rice, maybe slightly greasy to my taste with some lovely chunks of cepes in. Maybe a little rustc in comparison with the rest of the meal, but I would have loved to have eaten a large bowl of this as a meal in itself. Lovely with the wine.

A very light and fluffy crema catalana type thing; not at all heavy, with the custard being slightly "foamed" and a good textural contrast with the few crisp bits of the caramelled top.

A chocolate pudding that was a bit ho-hum ; a deep-fried beignet filled with a chocolate custard with a sort of mousse on the side. Good rich flavours but nothing exceptional.

I was the only one drinking so I had a bottle of standard Rioja (CVNE reserva 99) and a glass of PX to finish. The wine list is pretty good and stuffed with the usual Spanish trophy wines you would expect -- Pingus, L'ermita, VS etc etc.

The food is very good -- it is quite traditional, but very intelligent, and with a very spare presentation: there was almost nothing on the plate that didn't need to be there. Unfussy and it really lets the flavours of the ingredients come through. I loved it, but might not appeal to those of you always in search of the new new thing.

[SFJoe]

Nice to hear. I had a great meal at Gaig a few years ago. It was the only place that both Victor de la Serna and Gerry Dawes agreed on, and it proved out. Extremely warm welcome as well. Good to know that they are still going strong.

[pim]

balex, on Jul 12 2006, 03:06 PM, said:

Pigeon with rice; rice cooked in pigeon stock with cepes, and a small piece of pigeon leg on top. A lot of extremely tasty rice, maybe slightly greasy to my taste with some lovely chunks of cepes in. Maybe a little rustc in comparison with the rest of the meal, but I would have loved to have eaten a large bowl of this as a meal in itself. Lovely with the wine.

That's the same one I liked so much at Gaig. I had the same reaction you did, I could have eaten a huge bowl of it.